The synthetic ecosystems approach applies basic principles of natural agent systems to the design of artificial multi-agent systems. H. V. D. Parunak. ‘Go to the Ant’: Engineering Principles from Natural Agent Systems. Annals of Operations Research, 1997; E. Bonabeau, M. Dorigo, and G. Theraulaz. Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems. Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Oxford University Press, 1999. Natural agent systems, like social insect colonies or market economies, express system-level features that make them interesting blueprints for industrial applications. Made up of a large number of simple, locally interacting individuals, these systems are flexible to changing conditions, robust to component failure, scalable in size, adaptive to new environments, and intuitive in their structure. In natural agent systems, large numbers of individuals coordinate their activities in the fulfillment of tasks in stigmergetic interactions through the environment. P. -P. Grasse. La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations inter-individuelles chez bellicositermes natalensis et cubitermes sp. la theorie de la stigmergy: Essai d'interpretation du comportement des termites constructeurs. Insectes Sociaux, 6:41-80, 1959.
Problems associated with applying the concept of natural agent systems to create viable synthetic ecosystems have included determining a pheromone infrastructure necessary for a sensor operating in the system area to determine the spatial structure of the environment, sensor location, pheromone source location, and communicate such information with other sensors and/or system components tasked with locating synthetic pheromone sources.